Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Monday, November 18, 2013

The Curse of the Megacity

Simon Jenkins writes for The Guardian newspaper
as well as London’s
Evening Standard.In a recent article
for the Evening Standard (29th October 2013) he stated that “were Britain a separate Eurozone the north would
become Greece and Spain to London’s
Germany.”The article titled “Sorry, Archbishop but London is where the action
is” was an arrogant justification for the status quo. He is solidly upper
middle class which while not objectionable may have prejudiced him in favour of
the status quo. More later, on this.

In the last few years I have travelled around England for my
holidays and yes, Simon Jenkins is partially correct. London is different to anywhere else.London
is huge. The city population is around 8 ½ million people and between 14 million
and 21 million people reside in its greater metropolitan region. It is a sprawling and semi-violent megalopolis.
Like all world cities its infrastructure creaks and is often shambolic; it is
dirty and when it fails it does so with a spectacular aplomb that acknowledges
its divine right to extract even more money from us all, irrespective of where
we live in the UK.

Within its boundaries unspeakable wealth
proudly perches astride neighbourhoods of extreme deprivation while the poor
oil London’s
parts - as is the case in any centre of power. And London is a world city.Simon Jenkins suggests that in the most
recent recession “London
survived the recession astonishingly well…the cuts were down the line, out of
sight, in the provinces.” So while the rest of the developed world suffered the
deepest recession since the 1929 Depression, Londoners, we are informed, escaped
unaffected, except that in London 25% of those between the ages of 16 to 24 are
unemployed (as compared to 20% for the UK as a whole).And to all those Londoners who earn a
university degree, the disadvantage of not being in employment during the early
years after high-school may hit home hard when their first class honours degree
does not even gain them work as shop assistants and care workers.

Those statistics conveniently omit the people
who simply gave up trying to find work, or those who work in the ‘shadow’
economy (in Europe, said to be worth some €2.1
trillion – RT “European citizens survive thanks to shadow economy”).And the political classes of both left and right turned a blind eye to
the approaching catastrophe of a disconnected and aging population, living out
its latter years in isolation and poverty.

Smugly, Simon Jenkins boasts that we are
witness to the age of the big city with their hinterland of dormitory suburbs
and green belts for “leisure and weekending”. If London is privileged, it is also spoiled and
oblivious to the greater needs of the nation.If the megacity is the colossus dominating the nation (at least in Britain) then
it also represents the failure of society to adapt to population growth with
any future vision. Le Corbusier’s
modernist abomination – his dream of a cityscape of unrelenting uniformity and
grey mediocrity was intended to house the masses.It may have represented the negation of class
but his city lacked a soul.The megacity
represents the failure of human imagination and the triumph of a class
structure that depressingly refuses to acknowledge the weakness behind the idea
which encourages massive concentrations of population.

A new socio-economic model was recently
publicised in the British press.It breaks
society down into lots of Class sub-types. Status, wealth and education, set against
their absence, no longer suffice as predicators of class.I suspect that it is those people who want to
retain the divisions that will be most interested in its
re-classification.In fact class remains
three tiered but it can now be defined as the overwhelming majority in the middle
and at the extremes, the disinherited poor and the very rich.In the mid-twentieth century the middle
classes began the expansion that hugely diminished the lower classes. The
middle class enveloped all but those on the periphery of society. However, in the future we shall return to the
more traditional picture of a small middle class, a smaller upper class and a
huge pool of lower class workers and retirees.

If competition and technological advances wiped
out lower class jobs in the latter half of the twentieth century; cheap loans and
the idea that anything was materially possible pushed the poor into the middle
classes. A similar process will reverse the trend and it will destroy the
middle classes, creating another seismic shift in class identity. Eventually,
only the rich will enjoy any kind of security.

Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of
England was interviewed for the Daily Mail in October 2011.He described the British economy as
experiencing the biggest squeeze in living memory. But for the rich, there was rarely
if ever any pain.Taxes and soaring
costs affected the middle and lower classes only.It would be irrational to consider a future
that is any different to this.

How does class encourage the growth of the megacity?
Because big cities drain the vitality out of their provinces; through business
and fashion, culture and politics they attract the talent to the epicentre and utilise
resources far out of proportion to the rest of the nation.

London is a gargantuan source of energy
sapping the vigour out of everywhere else like a terrestrial ‘black hole’.Power is a magnet that attracts those seeking
it. It is a logical concomitant of centralisation. It is why I argue for
decentralisation because it is only through it, that the dilution of
centralised authority will occur.

There is no mystique surrounding centralisation
and there is no mystery surrounding power.Power entices those that yield it whether they are union officials or investment
managers; bank managers or local counsellors. Any power has the potential to
corrupt and far too often, checks and balances simply do not work. Bureaucracy institutionalises
the status quo. The industrial revolution created areas of devolved economic
activity but in Britain,
it failed to seduce those that wielded power, away from the centre. Eventually
the centre failed. Eire broke away from the British Empire; Northern Ireland became a backwater that had to
endure a decades-long civil war before anyone seriously noticed it, Scottish
nationalists salivate over the possibility of secession from the Union and one
day Wales will arrive at the
same conclusion; that London
rules and demands its medieval tribute still.

Centralisation encourages bad behaviour.
Numbers grow and solutions reach a level of complexity that creates
inefficiency. Instead of each of us becoming networked, our interconnection traps
us within a maze of interlocking systems that are managed remotely, in reality
disempowering consumers and businesses alike even as they create the illusion
of touch. In fact to talk about consumers and businesses is to dismiss people
as economic entities devoid of an identity.All systems become open to abuse.Someone somewhere can manipulate your powerlessness.

According to a Foreign Policy article of
September 2012 “Just 600 urban centres generate about 60% of global GDP” and
while the future 600 top urban centres will change over the next decade and
beyond, there will be no difference to the power they wield.Cities choked with toxic waste; health
scares, perhaps even pandemics created by not paying sufficient attention to
what is described, in the same magazine issue, as “ghettos of poverty and
dysfunction” (pollution, filth and disease) represents the dystopian vision for
our mass urbanized future.

It is only by creating distributed hubs with
local, decentralised controls that we will successfully redistribute and
therefore dilute power, away from the centre.What will then be created is a community of interest. Distributed efficiency
and shared knowledge will create interdependence. It is this community of
interest that society has had stolen from it by centralisation.

Decentralization means redistribution of
resources back to the provinces. It means sharing the wealth of institutions so
that culture resides in the nation and not just in the national capital. It
means focusing the development of infrastructure nationally and not on massive
and wasteful megaprojects that protect the pivotal position of the Centre.And lastly, it means creating imaginative
solutions in order to deconstruct the megacity, recreating the sense of local community
that once existed in semi-isolation only.

Sir Simon Jenkins represents a celebration of
the Titanic. He tells us that “bigger is better” and that the iceberg makes
wonderful ice-cubes for his martinis.But like other luminaries of the status quo he is blind to the threat to
his tranquillity.Megacities amplify
alienation for the poor and over the coming decades their numbers can only
massively increase in number.

In order for us to regain some of the empathy
of reduced scale the trend towards megacities must be reversed.Biologically, big is not better, ultimately
it leads to extinction. We should learn from nature.